ONE OF THE most enjoyable pieces of invective I have
read for a long time was Cassandra's column in Wednesday's Mirror. He had been smeared by John Gordon for his 'John Bull's Schooldays' article in the Spectator a couple of weeks ago, John Gordon's snide implication being that he had spent his Army service in a cushy journalistic job in Naples. After recounting briefly what he actually did during the war, Cassandra in his column turns to examine the war-time activities of 'Gordon, a well-known civilian figure at the Savoy Hotel in London,' who 'hatched out some of the most idiotic claptrap ever to insult good news- print in a time of intense scarcity. . . . It reached its addled climax when Gordon solemnly pro- posed that the way to shove Italy out of the war was to drop a bomb down the crater of Vesuvius, A hundred thousand soldiers in the Central Medi- terranean shook with pure joy at this supreme idiocy.' Cassandra then recalls Gordon's many apologies in public 'after dropping the most sense- less bricks caused by his unpleasant compound of pomposity, inaccuracy and malevolence,' includ- ing the notorious occasion when, caught in error, he turned and blamed it on his 'researcher.'
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